Corey and Scott blog about a letter to the editor these days which was printed in the local newspaper recently. The tag line of the letter was, that the State of Oregon should not fund the OSL with public money because Open Source Software (OSS) is bad for the principles of capitalism.

I personally think, Peter, the author of the letter, is not the only person to think like that about Open Source Software. And we should explain to those people why OSS is not "some sort of socialistic collaborative" but professional software engineering from a different point of view.

We get rid of what effectively breaks out good and secure software development, because teamwork is made more difficult if not totally prohibited: Closed source licenses. And by that, we open ourselves towards criticism, and we can achieve that some of the very best people in the world help us on our software projects. And they constantly improve them. Why? Because they can. Because they can effectively influence what happens to the software they use. Because we let them look at what's the core of the software: Its code.

And even though this sort of software is "freely available", capitalistic principles do not suffer. (Believe me one thing: IBM, HP and others would not spend a single dollar on OSS if they could not make money of it!) Even though I can download the software and play with its code, not everybody is able or willing to do so. And therefore, the "making of money" doesn't simply disappear how Peter fears. The place of making money shifts. Towards teaching people how to use the software. Towards maintenance contracts and towards personalized solutions.

Imagine, you want to have a special feature implemented in your software because it would help your 5000 employees making their everyday work. I want to see you talking to companies like Microsoft asking for a personalized feature in their software. ("Can you write me a plugin framework so that I can still use the scripts that we used before?"). And of course, people are paid for the work they do on that. But what the State of Oregon (and therefore, indirectly, the tax payer!) gets out of its money, is a boost in efficiency and security of the software they use. Every day.

The bottom line is: Please try to open yourself a little to this point of view. Try to see, that it might be more effective to collaborate on projects together rather than keeping your work for yourself. It's collaboration, not isolation, that makes innovation work.

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Im Fernsehen sah ich heute Werbung, dass Tanken ja immer teurer werde, und man daher bei F*rd eine ganze Menge Autos kaufen könne, die mehr als 25 Meilen pro Gallone Sprit schaffen.

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I just read about CGI::Ajax for Perl and was curious if there was something like it for PHP already?

And, look what's there, an alpha version of a PEAR AJAX library was released just this week.

Cool. We should have an eye on this as it could make AJAX stuff in PHP much, much easier.

(via Jeremy Zawodny)

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Weil hier die Vorlesungszeit ziemlich schnell rum ist, kommt auch das Konzert schneller, als ich es von anderen Orchestern gewöhnt bin.

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Wenn ihr noch nicht so ganz gepeilt habt, was ich da eigentlich immer von diesem ominösen Open Source Lab schwafele, ist das zugegeben keine Schande.

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Das Centrum für Hochschulentwicklung (CHE) hat gestern sein aktuelles Forschungsranking deutscher Hochschulen veröffentlicht.

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Somebody told me recently, this year's Oregon winter would become colder, yet less wet than what the common Oregonian would call a "usual winter".

He read it on the internet - therefore it must be true, right? ;)

The current weather at least seems to sustain his theory. Pretty cold hands and ears when riding the bike in the morning, but a relatively dry seat... seems to be much better of a weather for me as a part-time Oregonian! It was even nice enough for me to take a handful of new photos from my "fall at osu series"...

Fall Trees

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Oh, short notice:

The German Telekom seems to have hired the same "web designer" for the administration interface of their WiFi routers, too. I just tried to change basic settings like IP address and WPA password, which turned out to be a quite complicated task as the admin interface was overly filled with useless JavaScript stuff as well as a couple of hard redirects to the IP of the router.

I imagine the "non-functional requirement" the code writer had to fulfill was something like: "Make remote administration of this device as complicated as possible". This is especially sweet if you want to access it from a distance of a few thousand miles...

Anyways, with a few tricks I managed it finally.

Thank you for wasting my time, German Telekom...!

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Jedes mal, wenn ich einkaufen gehe entdecke ich neue, kleine Seltsamkeiten in amerikanischen Supermarktregalen.

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Meinen Samstagnachmittag habe ich in den Woodburn Company Stores verbracht. Das ist ein ziemlich großes Shopping Center mit allerhand Outlet-Stores, irgendwo zwischen Salem und Portland.

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